The Sulawesi cave art in Indonesia was first discovered in the 1950s and was initially presumed to be no more than 10,000 years old because scientists didn’t believe that anything older could survive in a tropical climate.

“Our discovery on Sulawesi shows that cave art was made at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world at about the same time, suggesting these practices have deeper origins,” said Dr. Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Archaeologist Alistair Pike of the University of Southampton in the U.K. stated, “We’ve been shown here that our views have been too ‘Euro-centric’ about the origins of cave painting. Absolutely this changes our views, and is going to make us ask a lot of questions about the causes rather than the origins of cave art.”

There are also paintings in La Marche in France, which are dated to be over 14,000 years old. Whilst they’re not as old as those found in Sulawesi, what’s amazing about the cave art found in La Marche is that the humans depicted are wearing robes, hats, and boots. This reveals to us that these people knew how to make and weave cloth.